Views - Explanation (Views and View Policies)

This video from VAST Data Customer Education provides a fundamental explanation of Views within the VAST Management System (VMS). For storage administrators and operators, a view is the primary mechanism for exposing a specific portion of the VAST Element Store to clients, presenting the underlying data through a familiar hierarchical file system-like structure. The video details the core functions of a view:

• Defining Data Location: Specifies the path within the Element Store where the data for the view resides.

• Protocol Assignment: Determines which access protocols will be used to share the data. VAST Data supports standard protocols including NFSv3, NFSv4, SMB (for Windows clients), and S3 buckets.

• Support for Diverse Workloads: Briefly touches on specialized view types, such as Database views, and highlights the upcoming support for block storage in VAST 5.3.

We walk through the key parameters required when creating a new view, including its association with a tenant, the specified path, and protocol-specific inputs like SMB share names or S3 bucket names. The video also introduces the concept of view policies, which govern additional settings and Quality of Service (QoS) for data access. The explanation clarifies that creating a view is analogous to exporting a file system; critically, removing a view does not delete the underlying data. The flexibility of VAST views is further demonstrated through the support for nested views, allowing for differentiated access rules at various levels. Finally, the video covers protocol-specific features configurable within views, such as SMB ACLs (Share-Level ACLs) for granular access control on SMB shares, and S3 features like S3 versioning and S3 object locks, which can be enabled based on the chosen object storage protocol. This tutorial provides VAST Data operators with a foundational understanding of views, empowering them to effectively configure and manage multi-protocol data access and storage networking for various client environments on their VAST clusters.